With an estimated 300 million mobile phones in use in the United States, such phones have become an essential part of daily life. However, for those who are deaf or are losing their hearing, using mobile phones is difficult, if not impossible. This is especially true in the case of late deafened adults—people who have lost the ability to understand speech with or without hearing aids after acquiring a spoken language—a group that is growing as the population of the United States and other countries ages. According to the 2006 National Health Interview Survey conducted by the National Center for Heath Statistics of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there are 37 million adults in the U.S. with hearing trouble. Many of these are late deafened adults and the size of this group is expected to grow quickly as the 76 million baby boomers in this country reach retirement age. In addition, there are about 4 million adults and children that are severely hearing impaired or deaf.
Among the side effects of deafness are isolation from others, difficulty in communicating and getting help in an emergency. Communications technologies that can help in this area are vital to the health and well-being of the large and expanding population of hearing impaired persons. Accordingly, captioning services for telephone communications have been developed. These services provide hearing impaired persons with access to transcriptions of telephone calls in the form of text-based communications delivered to specially adapted terminals that resemble conventional telephones. One provider of such captioning services is Ultratec, Inc. of Madison, Wis., which provides the service under the trade name CapTel™. However, the terminals configured for use with the CapTel service require the use of analog landline telephone connections and cannot be used in office environments that employ digital private branch exchange systems (unless an analog port is available). The CapTel service is also available for use with Internet connections, including those on mobile phones. The mobile phones (or other computing device) must have access to a high speed data connection and browsing software, and, except in select service areas, two devices are required to use the service (one for the captions and one for voice communications).